For Immediate Release (if not sooner)

Contact:  Your Real Estate Broker

New precise scientifically valid questionnaire determines

Whether individuals should be consulting a parenting manual

In a stunning breakthrough in statistical science that has caught the attention of whichever one of those Nobel Prize Committees gives out awards for that sort of thing, a team of experts has created a valid scientific instrument that determines with great precision, more or less, whether any particular individual really ought to be reading a great book on parenting written by soon-to-be-best-selling-author Robert Veres.

“We originally thought we had a cure for cancer,” said Austin Wheelwright, Ph.D., RIA, the leader of the very smart scientific team that created the questionnaire.  “You wouldn’t believe how excited we were; it was, like, hey, we’ll make so much money we won’t have to stare into microscopes all day long any more.  We’ll get out to the beach and hang out with the surfers and maybe get a tan.  It’s not easy to describe how disappointed we were,” he added with a tear rolling down his cheek, “when we realized that all this does is figure out, to the tenth of a person, how many of you folks out there ought to be boning up on parenting.”

One of the best parts about this rigorous scientific questionnaire is that anybody can take it in less than five minutes and come away with a definitive answer.  In fact, you could take it right now if you want.

Here are the questions:

Are you now or have you ever been a parent?  (If you answer yes, then skip to the bottom for your scientifically-based determination, which comes after the highlighted word “Recommendation.”)

Have you ever been parented by another human being?  (If you answer yes, then skip to the bottom for your scientifically-based determination, which comes after the highlighted word “Recommendation.”)

Is at least one of your parents sometimes really annoying? (If you answer yes—hey, you probably know the drill by now.)

Are you ever at a loss for words when your teenage daughter brings home what appears to be an escaped baboon and insists on dating it?  (If yes… you know.)

Do you have any drug habits we should know about?  (If yes…)

Before you had kids, were you ever required to take a course on parenting, child rearing, or even get a simple demonstration on how to properly change a diaper?  Did anybody else that you know of?  Don’t you think that’s dysfunctional, dangerous and maybe a little scary?  (If you answered yes or no to any of these questions, then go to the bottom and get your recommendation.)

Did your own parents ever treat you unfairly when you were growing up?  Like, when your little sister put your Metallica CDs in the toaster, they blamed you for leaving them out where she could get her hands on them, and you could tell they were secretly glad that you weren’t listening to that garbage any more?  (If yes, go to the bottom and do that thing we’ve been telling you to do.)

How did that make you feel?  (If you answer yes, then this might be a good time to jump right to the conclusion of the questionnaire, because you’re obviously no longer paying attention.  You might as well, because the whole exercise is really over anyway.)

Recommendation:  Count your yes and no answers carefully.  If those represented more than one of your responses during the “question” part of this scientific instrument, then you should immediately go out and buy a parenting book entitled Conversations With My Daughter, which may not exactly make you a better or more informed parent, but it might be a better use of your time than this questionnaire thing you just went through.

For release: next Thursday or Friday or maybe Monday

Contact:  The Author directly until he can find a publicist more tolerant of his perfectly normal mood swings.

Survey Finds Shockingly High Number of Real Americans Are Not Exactly Brain Surgeons When It Comes to Parenting

A wide-ranging survey that has apparently caught the prestigious Roper and Gallup organizations totally by surprise has found that fully 71% of all Real Americans have not received formal university training before becoming parents of living, breathing human beings who totally depend on them for survival for the first 28 years of their life.

“Frankly, we were kind of surprised,” said Robert Veres, who conducted the scientific survey of people he ran into in the grocery store one day, and who also happens, by a startling coincidence, to be author of a book he hopes will one day be a core part of a University parenting curriculum, called Conversations With My Daughter.  “I didn’t realize how many people would be willing to call the store security guard just because a perfect stranger was asking them a perfectly simple question.”

The survey found that another 19% of Real Americans were confused about where, in our advanced society, parental training is even offered.  Those people REALLY need to read Conversations With My Daughter, in the opinion of the pollsters.

Another 6.5% were found to have embarrassingly long nose hair.

In other results, eight percent of the respondents, more or less, admitted that they might have made a mistake or two when raising their kids, but couldn’t remember what it was.  And an astonishing 100% remembered vividly a whole bunch of mistakes their own parents made.  “We concluded that people who had, at one time, been parented, were exposed to many more mistakes from parents than parents had actually committed,” says Veres.

All results have a scientific validity of plus or minus 93.6613% or so.

Meanwhile, the survey found that among Fake Americans, only 12% had that university training that we were talking about earlier, but we suspect they might have been lying, because a much smaller cohort (3%) of Imaginary Americans were so trained.  “Imaginary Americans is not really the demographic we’re shooting for when trying to position Conversations With My Daughter as a valid parenting textbook,” said Veres.  “But it does seem to be where most of our sales are coming from so far.”

The survey was able to pin down, to the tenth of a person, how many people in the world are kind of clueless about parenting: 5,893, 622,811.3.

A spokesperson for the Council of American Survey Research Organization professed to be “shocked” by the results of this scientific poll.  “We think it may constitute an ethics violation,” she said.  “Our attorneys are looking into it, but until they report back, we really have no further comment.”

For release two weeks ago

Contact Elizabeth Gartenburg unless she, too, decides to resign this engagement.

Pulitzer Prize Committee tested, proves discouragingly unsusceptible to bribery.  Contest integrity reaffirmed by interesting experiment.

In what experts are calling a supreme test of the fairness of the Pulitzer evaluation process, six checks in the amount of $147.95 were returned without comment to the noted and prestigious author of the increasingly famous book Conversations With My Daughter, which by the way is extremely funny, in case you’re one of the few who still haven’t read it.

“Boy, those committee folks have gobs of integrity,” said Robert Veres, who sent the checks earlier this month, along with a letter specifying exactly the award he expected to receive in return for his largesse.  “People said that the contest is highly political, so I just assumed it worked like Congress.  I guess I was wrong.”

Even so, the author seemed to be upbeat and undiscouraged by the ineffectiveness of his ploy.  “Why do you keep asking whether I’m discouraged?” he demanded.  “I think sometimes you forget you’re supposed to be working for me in these press release things,” he added in what could only be described as a very testy tone of voice.

Although he still confidently expects to win the Letters award on merit alone, Mr. Veres has not ruled out the possibility of stuffing ten dollar bills into the shirt pockets of members of the Pulitzer awards committee, should he encounter any of them in a social setting.  “Let’s see how much integrity they have when they feel the green cabbage against their skin,” he said.

The book in question—which, in case you weren’t paying attention in that earlier paragraph, is titled Conversations With My Daughter—is an inevitable best-seller which accurately reproduces the imaginative versions of real-world kinds of conversations that real fathers might have with real daughters in some alternate universe that is much, MUCH funnier than this one.

Embargoed material until April 1, 2012

Contact Marion Bradley (Johanna Crawford resigned this engagement, not that it’s any of your business…)

Pulitzer Prize Committee IS STILL GOING TO BE CONSIDERING Conversations With My Daughter for Prestigious Award.

A month before the first entries can possibly made to the contest, Conversations With My Daughter still appears to be under serious consideration for the Pulitzer Prize Award for Letters.

When reached at his home, a professor at the University of Columbia, which awards the prestigious honor, had this to say: “Do you have any idea what time of night this is?  I’m a biology professor, for cripes sakes; I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Letters requesting the precise status of the hilarious compilation of family-related humor were referred to a prestigious law firm which has been retained by the esteemed Columbia University School of Journalism specifically to deal with all things related to this remarkable manuscript.  “We’re not issuing any comments until the injunction has been granted by the lower court,” a representative of the firm said with noticeable testiness in his voice, in response to a really harmless inquiry.

“No,” he added in response to another harmless inquiry: “I am NOT having a bad day.”

For those few avid readers who have not yet had the pleasure of reading it, Conversations With My Daughter is a brilliant evocation of the real-world experiences that fathers have with their daughters throughout the period when the daughters are growing up and routinely outwitting their parents on everything from bedtime to boyfriends.  It also offers a lot of good, practical advice for parents who might not have received the operators manual when they took their newborn baby home from the hospital.

“I laughed until I peed in my pants,” is how one reader describes the experience of digesting this important information.  “Wait;” he added a moment later.  “Is that recording thing on?”

A representative of the prestigious Incontinence Association of America in Silver Spring, MD confirmed that sales of adult diapers have spiked since the book’s publication.  “If this Veres guy would just keep writing those really funny books of his, we could all retire rich,” she said.

For immediate release

Contact Marion Bradley, just not at her home or after hours.

Author considering removal of Conversations With My Daughter from consideration for Pulitzer Prize. Worried that committee members might permanently injure themselves by laughing too hard.

Robert Veres, author of the really wonderful, heartwarming, funny, charming, hilarious and just plain darned good book entitled Conversations With My Daughter is said to be considering a rare move in the world of critically-acclaimed fiction.  “Yes, I’ve been thinking about removing my book from the list of potential Pulitzer Prize winners,” Mr. Veres said in a press conference at his home in San Diego.

The reason for this drastic move is purely humanitarian, he said in response to an inquiry that he selected from dozens of jostling members of the international press who had made the pilgrimage to his front lawn from global news outlets all over the globe.  “I’m not totally sure that some of those judges have actually laughed out loud since the Nixon Administration,” he said.  “What happens when they get to the really funny part of the book when the father is having The Talk with his teenage daughter?  Or the bedtime ritual where the daughter manages to—ha ha ha; see, even I can’t talk about it without busting a gut.  Somebody might die laughing, and who would want to carry THAT around on their conscience?”

Mr. Veres later speculated that if his work proved to be the cause of the death of one or more of the prestigious judges in this contest, it might count against him when the diminished group ultimately selects a winner.  “It’s possible, under those circumstances, that I wouldn’t get a totally fair evaluation from the angry survivors,” he said.

Noted board-certified gut and belly specialist Dr. Martin Weymayer says that while it is a misnomer that people actually rupture their stomach lining or intestines when laughing at books as downright funny as Conversations With My Daughter, he concedes that there have indeed been medically-confirmed instances of people expiring from too much laughter.  “I think he’s right to worry about the older members of the Pulitzer Committee,” Mr. Weymayer said.  “Sudden exposure to so many funny scenarios coming at you all at once could potentially be dangerous to anybody who is not in excellent health.”

After a brief but animated conference with the author, Mr. Weymayer stepped back up to the podium, pocketed several large-denomination bills, and announced that you, whoever is reading this, should not be deterred from buying the book because of any supposed physical danger.  “If you’re not on the Pulitzer Committee,” he said, “and if you actually have a sense of humor, then, from a health standpoint, I would recommend that you buy Conversations With My Daughter as soon as possible, and–” he added, looking across the way toward the author– “also buy it for all your friends and neighbors as gifts.”

For immediate release

Contact Johanna Crawford

Conversations With My Daughter will be entered in Pulitzer Prize Contest for Letters.  Author confidently predicts victory.

In a stunning development in the cloistered world of critically-acclaimed literature, a book that contains virtually no serious content, whose every page is devoted to the most profound kind of ridiculousness, is being entered into what may be the world’s most prestigious literary contest.  The book, entitled Conversations With My Daughter, offers some of the funniest father/daughter dialogue in all literature, and is widely expected to capture the top prize, according to a number of the author’s family members who asked not to be named specifically in this press release under penalty of a lawsuit.

“There’s no redeeming social value at all in the #@&% thing,” said a young woman who refused to give her identity when asked directly if she was the author’s daughter.

“Watch your &%#@&%$ mouth, young lady,” the author is said to have responded.

After police had restored order, Mr. Veres compared his efforts to provide parenting advice with other great works of literature.  “I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I’ve left Tolstoy and Marquez in the dust,” he said.  “That’s what literary critics are for.”

Meanwhile, in a related development which almost certainly portends well for the book’s chances in the contest, court documents reveal that two of the esteemed Pulitzer contest judges have filed an injunction to keep the author of Conversations With My Daughter at least 1,500 feet from their midtown apartments.